"If it includes everything, it becomes meaningless."

[alixtii]

There is a claim I've seen being made a lot lately, in a lot of different places (but part of the same overall argument) by different people, that if a word applies to everything it becomes meaningless. Can anyone explain this claim to me?

If I say "everything is made up of atoms" does that mean "made up of atoms" is a meaningless category?

I remember having a conversation on the OTW FAQ and the language it uses, referring to what I would call source texts as "original works" and thus inadvertently imply intentionality which isn't truly there in the case of many RPF canons, in the comments of this post, with jadelennox, in which she said:

The jargon term "text" encompasses the idea that all objects, experiences, encounters, etc. are analyzable under the same lens is we would use to analyze the non-jargon "texts". There really isn't any jargon-free way to say "I mean everything in the world, except everything in the world from the point of view that you can look at everything in the world as a text". I'm not even explaining it well when I try to translate it into a whole lot of English words. *shakes tiny fist*

Is the "except [. . .] from the point of view that you can look at everything in the world as a text" part of her definition really lacking any semantic content?

If I say everything is about sex, or the death-drive, or the means of production, or the will-to-power, am I making meaningless statements?

If everything is X then, a) that may say something meaningful about the state of everything, and b) that doesn't eliminate the possibility that some things are more X than others, closer to the center of the conceptual web, less problematically X, while others lurk in the fuzzy boundaries.

Or am I just insane?

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/peasant_/]

Again, that's a prior ideological commitment flavoring one's definition of "everything."

True. Which adds to the charge that the phrase 'Everything is X' is meaningless, if you are using 'X' not to describe 'everything' but merely to define 'everything', it either takes you away from the current definition of everything or it expands the definition of 'X' until it is worthless and the statement becomes a tautology.

At which point I think I want my lunch.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

I'd agree that it functions primarily as a theoreticall statement. I think "everything is made up of atoms" functions the same way; atoms are defined as those things out of which everything else is made uip. IT's not as if atoms and everything are floating in some real world somewhere, and we already have the concepts 'atom' and 'everything' in our head, and we go to the real world to see how they hook up. It's a statement of scientific theory, not scientific empiricism.

But it's still not meaningless. (Again, the synthetic a priori, but instead of one permanently fixed into our conceptual catefories, one which is contingent and arbitrary.)

[http://users.livejournal.com/peasant_/]

Ah, I think I may have got it. everything is made up of atoms is not meaningless because the statement by its very existence defines what you mean by 'everything'. There are after all plenty of things that are not made up of atoms - subatomic particles, energy in all its various forms, time - a physicist could doubtless list others, and I know that you know this because you said do up above. So the statement has defined what you personally mean by 'everything' for the purpose of this conversation. You have narrowed your 'everything' down to a very specific subset of the available interpretations. That, I agree, is frequently a very useful thing to do. It provides the boundaries for the discussion, tells me something about yourself and how you think, and has value in a conversational sense. Is that what you meant by 'not meaningless'?


I have just realised that the above argument is dependent on the scientific definition of atoms and it is possible that you meant the philosophical definition. I am assuming however that you meant the scientific because of your statement that it was scientific theory not scientific empiricism. If you meant the philosophical definition then as far as I can see we are back to a tautology and you will have to try to explain again, preferably using smaller words and plenty of pictures :oD